Usmanov wants answers at the AGM

It’s the day of the Arsenal Annual General Meeting.. The day when shareholders and other interested parties get to ask questions of the owner, board of directors and manager. Whether any of those questions is rewarded with a full and frank answer is open to doubt.

It was reported in the press yesterday that Alisher Usmanov, Arsenal’s second largest shareholder, has written to Stan Kroenke seeking a detailed explanation why, for the second year running, Arsenal have paid a sum of £3 million to Kroenke Sports and Entertainment. According to Arsenal Chairman Sir Chips Keswick last year’s payment was for “the wide range of services” provided by KSE.

Another item to be brought up is a request for an independent review of the club’s transfer strategy following the failure to sign any out-field players during the last transfer window.

There will, no doubt be questions asked about the size of the club’s wage bill, how much money there is in the transfer kitty and whether the price of match day tickets is likely to be reduced in view of the greatly enlarged sums pouring into the Club’s coffers from both television deals and sponsorship.

I’m sure AAers will have other questions that they would like to put forward, Why not list them in your comments below. You never know someone attending the AGM may just read them and may just put one to the hierarchy.

Written by Norfolk Gooner

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 14th, 2015 at 1:43 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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What we need from Arsenal is a winning team and add more two players. We need a defensive midfielder in case Coquelin get injured and a top striker is needed urgently. those are the two things Arsenal should consider.

The £3m payment is certainly worrying but I would imagine any questions about recruitement could be succinctly answered by just putting a Walcott cardboard cutout nearby, considering that most of the panty wetting was over not having a striker who could provide competition for Giroud, may be a little too subtle for some of the journalists,but a few might get it.

Not sure how you know Usmanov is the second largest shareholder as he has apparently been on a veggies only diet for 6 months.

The £3m payment for services rendered is such a tiny petty cash item that I have no idea why it causes so much judicious harrumphing.

If Kroenke wanted to he would be legally and morally entitled to vote for many more millions of pounds of share dividends to reflect the club’s successful financial year, and to give a return on his billion pounds sterling investment, too.

It comes into the ‘what can we moan about now’ category – not that I am suggesting that is what you are doing – obviously! 😀

Footballers become defined by a few brief moments. As our brains struggle to retain the sheer volume of football data we are continuously absorbing, it becomes inevitable that even the greatest should be remembered (but not reduced) to a few seconds, sometimes spread over decades. Gordon Banks is the save from Pele, Cristiano Ronaldo the strutted celebration, Bobby Moore held aloft by his England team-mates.

With Dennis Bergkamp, there could only be two moments. The first is his goal against Argentina in the 1998 World Cup quarter-final, the second his flick around Nikos Dabizas against Newcastle in March 2002. Both displayed the technical ability and awareness present only in an elite few in every generation. Both made very good players look like footballing fools. Both were carried out with an insouciance that masked the hard work and commitment at their root.

At his best, Bergkamp boasted a rare ability shared only by the game’s best players – the capacity to slow down the game around him. It was not mythical, either. The sense that Bergkamp had more time on the ball to produce moments of the sublime is not a trick of the mind, more an indication of his skill. Bergkamp’s touch and awareness combined to afford him an extra half-second ahead of almost every opponent. His technique exploited that time to the maximum. Zinedine Zidane was the master of this art.

In a sport increasingly obsessed by records and milestones, Bergkamp sticks out as one of the most artistic players in recent memory. You would pay to watch him, not necessarily to see him score or assist a goal, but just to watch him play. Like Eric Cantona before him, this was football of feelings, not figures.

Bergkamp was one of the most technically gifted players of the Premier League era. At a time when foreigners in English football still had an air of mystery, this was like something from another world. His first touch deserves its own wing in a hall of fame. Paul Gascoigne was arguably England’s finest touch player of the 20th century, but here was a player with the abilities of a maverick and without the ‘but’. The Dutchman’s fear of flying was his only flaw.

Ian Wright tells an anecdote of Bergkamp’s first touch, reminiscing about a goal he scored against Tottenham in his first season in England. “It was one touch, one touch! We’re talking about a ball that has just travelled 40 yards in the air and he’s killed it dead,” Wright said. “I knew that if I get the ball over in his general direction there’s a chance he’ll do something I haven’t even thought of.” Arsenal’s second-highest goalscorer of all time, reduced to wide-eyed fan.

It almost goes without saying that Bergkamp possessed immense trickery and flair, but his was an elevated type of skill. Modern (and largely social) media has promoted tricks and skills into their own sport, ‘tekkers’ worthy of praise in isolation. Football freestyling is now a thing.

We assume that Dennis does not approve. For him, skills were not affectations or accessories, but a vital part of the game. A trick was utilised, not performed, used not for its own end but simply to help his team succeed.

Take that Newcastle goal, for example. “I thought the ball was a little too much behind me so I had to turn to control it,” Bergkamp said. “The quickest way to turn the ball was going that way. It looked a bit special or strange or nice but for me it was the quickest way to the goal. The finish was about just trying to get it past the goalkeeper in such a way he cannot reach it.”

The impudence and brilliance of the goal is played down to an almost parodical level. Efficiency has rarely been so sexy.

Yet the focus on Bergkamp’s technical ability overshadows his greatest attribute: commitment. At a time when foreign imports were (sometimes fairly) accused of clambering aboard the Premier League bus for the money and a last hurrah, Bergkamp demonstrated the total determination that would ensure his natural ability was maximised.

If Bergkamp was one part artist, he was at least another part fighter, a drive to succeed described perfectly by Thierry Henry. “Everything had to be perfect, even in training. Everything at one hundred per cent. He’s a very funny guy but when he was working there was no joking.” Bergkamp required aggression to assimilate into an English game which was still stylistically similar to the old First Division. You needed to be physical to succeed.

It is this total commitment which saw Bergkamp thrive in England. The Dutchman’s Arsenal career was born under Bruce Rioch, but he developed under Arsene Wenger.

The Dutch have a word, liefhebber, which Bergkamp uses in his book Stillness and Speed. It translates as ‘love-haver’, and he utilises it purposefully to describe his dedication to the game. This is a player happy to treat football as religion, to sacrifice his time and total effort for the cause. He is football’s equivalent to a Zen monk living in a cave for six years. “Behind every kick of the ball there has to be a thought,” is one of Bergkamp’s more famous quotes. Wenger is a staunch believer in this philosophy.

“I believe Dennis was one of those who had such a high idea of the game that he wanted that to be above everything,” Wenger says. It was as if Bergkamp wanted to improve not to make himself better (and certainly not richer), but to improve the game as a whole through his performances, even if only by a small margin. On a more micro level, he was the ultimate team player, lacking in all selfishness and ego. This was about football and Arsenal, not individual accolades.

For Bergkamp, this commitment is the most vital part of excellence. The first chapter of his autobiography is entitled ‘The Wall’, where he details his infatuation with the detail. “Most of the time I was by myself, just kicking the ball against the wall, seeing how it bounces, how it comes back, just controlling it,” Bergkamp says of his childhood years.

“I was just very intrigued by how the ball moves, how the spin worked, what you could do with spin,” Bergkamp concludes. He claims not to be a football obsessive, but one thinks he doth protest too much. Among students of the game, Dennis is the grandmaster.

As modern football has become business, difference has been suffocated. Managers prefer reliability over distinction. To be enigmatic is now steeped in negative connotation, synonymous with being undependable and erratic. You control the controllables, and shun the non-compliant. Football’s mavericks are an endangered species.

Bergkamp showed that there is a third way, that enigma and dependability need not be mutually exclusive. He was a mass of contradictions: passion and grace, calmness and aggression, stillness and speed. Only the best can manage such potential imbalance and yet channel it in the perfect way; Bergkamp was indeed one of the best.

Redders, it’s true that Alisher is the second largest shareholder but I didn’t want to be the first to say that he’s the largest holder of shares. 😀

I suppose the miniscule sum of £3 miilion a year is in reality peanuts, but there aren’t that many sticks to beat the BoD with at the moment….Thanks largely to the excellent form of your favourite central striker Theo Walcott.

1) Chavs zero debt !, but if they have a £984M interest free loan from their owner what about paying the capital off, surely that is still a debt even if it is interest free !

2) Other than Manshafter Std, there is not a great difference between Us , Mansour City, Chavs in revenue…..If Kroenke had not taken his £3M we could have paid higher wages than both Chavs and Mansour City !

3) We have a bigger profit than the lesser two, a bigger Revenue than Chavs ( #The Chavs figures were from 2013/14# ) and a less % of Wage/Rev` ratio than the Chavs .

If correct, them figures make decent reading`s to a layman like me and begs the question …….who says we cant compete with them ?………………………………………unless this is all pre-FFP downfall………….then ignore this post and carry on eating your evening tea and expect more TW`s of prudence !. 🙂

1.The Age of the board members and their interest in AFC as a football club visa vie them just sitting there pretty looking at their bank account every season.
2. Wenger’s continued suitability for the manager position when all teams are building and becoming stronger yet his is stagnant if not regressing.
3.How & why Goroud was given a new improved contract way be4 his contract yet players like Van Passie Fabrigas were left to play upto the last year of their contracts.

Evening all, seems i have missed a bit today, Never worry about dumping one of mine, Breaking news is always what should be printed. Nice one NG,But thanks for some of your comments made me chuckle.

AGM’s does not mean a great deal to me as i never feel anything worth knowing comes out at these functions. Questions are asked, usually to embarrass, and lies seem to spill out,

£3 mill is a drop in the ocean to a club like Arsenal just waved away, but to a guy like me an absolute fortune, that amount would change my way of life until i died, bet its not enough to buy a half decent footballer.

Usmanov may well ask about the amount, but he is only stiring, he spends more than that to fill his fleet up.

Well done all for keeping the blog alive during the interlull, I am afraid I have been far too busy working to consider Arsenal.

In terms of a question for AGM:

“Why are the club so bad at getting positive PR in to the greater domain and so poor at releasing bad PR?”

The most recent accounts were announced the day before Chavs, and that allowed headlines about £200m cash in the bank and not a single bit of explanation of the numbers….not that necessarily the media would print them but at least you would have a chance of getting your message out.

The good PR….I only found out the other day that the club is funding a discount in away tickets. Yeah I know….how many found apart from Chas knew that?

“Arsenal’s travelling supporters will receive a £4.00 discount on every away Premier League match ticket purchased during the 2015/16 season.

The subsidy is intended to benefit those supporters who travel away from home most regularly, and amounts to a potential saving of £76 across the year.

It will be the third season in a row that away fans’ dedication on the road has been recognised in this way. A £2.50 per match discount was made available to travelling supporters in 2013/14 and 2014/15.

We are due to receive an allocation of 2800 tickets for this fixture.”

Some would probably say £4 is not a big saving, well considering tickets for WBA are now £39 that is in fact a 10% saving for our most loyal fans.

I feel a bit guilty now for not sharing the ticket discount on away tickets!
We tend to book by phone as it’s seems so much easier than the online system and you actually get to speak to a real person. The booking fee for telephone bookings is £1.85 per ticket, so when the discount was £2.50, it didn’t really feel like you were getting anything.
I can’t say I’ve noticed the £4 discount, but then it always seems to me that either want to pay (or can afford to pay) to go or you don’t regardless of price.

Talking of ticket prices, I found this interesting (the last line of which says, “A recent study found the average price of a ticket in England’s top flight is £54, while the cost of a ticket in Germany is just £23”).

I feel a bit guilty now for not sharing the ticket discount on away tickets!
We tend to book by phone as it’s seems so much easier than the online system and you actually get to speak to a real person. The booking fee for telephone bookings is £1.85 per ticket, so when the discount was £2.50, it didn’t really feel like you were getting anything.
I can’t say I’ve noticed the £4 discount, but then it always seems to me that either want to pay (or can afford to pay) to go or you don’t regardless of price.

Talking of ticket prices, I found this interesting (the last line of which says, “A recent study found the average price of a ticket in England’s top flight is £54, while the cost of a ticket in Germany is just £23”).

oh dear…. it was all a bit fishy on here yesterday. Peaches got well kippered and wanted to be in another plaice. Cod have been a lotte worse, and the sole positive was some of the excellent comments. It was all a bit of a red herring…. halibut was the moray of the story? A bad day of fishing is still better than a good day at work.

Does anyone actually believe that Man City’s wage bill is the same as ours?
Surely it’s all smoke and mirrors accountancy tricks?
Don’t they as a club sponsors themselves, in effect. They made a profit, my arse.

I can’t ignore it, it’s right where the comments link is.
I’m ultra squeamish with regard to those type of injuries and never, ever look at photos or videos of them by choice.
I didn’t even read your blog when I saw that photo!

Fair enough.
Personally, I don’t really count the corporate noose, at all, for anything since most of them aren’t in their seats for half of the game and most probably didn’t pay for their seat either.
It’s vital for the Club’s accounts, though.

Micky if we are excluding the noose why don’t we exclude the £97’ers after al they amount to two blocks opposite the Directors Box, or half way line, front of the upper tier, best seats in the house, and are included because it’s judged to be a “normal seat”.

Chas from memory the reason City got hit with FFP fines was because some of their wages and costs of running the club were gives off to a subsidiary company, our wage bill represents the majority of wages for running our club, ie wages for stadium staff, box office, commercial teams, chefs etc etc etc. I think City shelved a load of costs related to commercial teams and stadium operations to a subsidiary company which made losses.

Whether they are continuing with that we will wait and see for next round of FFP enquirer if it ever comes.

I wonder with the removal of Platini someone who started the FFP and has now effectively ended it whether it will start again…..now he has been shown to have a propensity for a cash incentive I wonder whether he was “influenced” to relax FFP?

Chas re feeling guilty so you should…..we all thought that was costing the earth going home and away but with a cracking discount like that obviously paying for at least one beer on a Matchday turns out your just freeloading 🙂

The point about getting good news out there is further highlighted by the BBC Price of Football, there is an asterisk at the bottom of the page that says what clubs are doing for away fans, Arsenal are one of the few that are discounting every ticket.

We shouldn’t forget that some clubs have entered into agreements that prices will be same for the away fans at both grounds, is Newcastle charge Sunderland fans £30, and Sunderland charge Newcastle the same.

How many clubs have actually agreed that with Arsenal, or would be interested in doing so? None and not many as in the main the same fixture away from home costs more than the corresponding fixture at home, for arguments sake Norwich have previously charged Arsenal fans £50 to get into Carrow Road, Norwich fans pay £27 at the Emirates.

Exile
I really wasn’t making any particular point.
I don’t think Arsenal is either cheap or expensive by English standards. Seems about right.
Now English prices against German. Different ball game. Yes reasons for that, but look at the Bayern business model and it is vastly superior to ours in my opinion.

Good day all. Had a bit of an AWOL period so sorry I have missed many fine posts. Hopefully will have a moment or two over the next couple of days to look back on some of them and the comments, although I have had brief looks at the general mood on A.A.

Thanks for today’s musings Norfolk. I must admit I am not too sure the £3m bothers me as much as others. He is the owner and is entitled to do what he wants. If he was taking £3m and saying there is nothing left for squad investment that is one thing, but I don’t think that is the case.

My focus would be more on the squad and how to get it onto a level where it can compete consistently at the levels of the Barca’s, Madrid’s and Bayern’s. I don’t think we are far away and I have noted that the general euphoria of the Utd win carried on for a while. Why not anyway?

I would have some caution though as I feel Utd are a bit poor at the moment, and we need to be able to produce these performances regularly if we want to win the EPL, which I believe we can this year.

The top eight can compete. At the moment the top eight can mathematically compete. I would say five or six teams.

On Chelsea not being in the top eight…

They have some ground to make up. It is different to anybody out there at the moment, even Chelsea. Of course when you have many teams in front of you it is difficult to catch up but they have the quality.

On if Chelsea are outsiders…

I don’t know. I don’t care too much about that. My worries are about my team and what we can do. We are two points behind the leaders and what all the other teams do is up to them. What I just want to say is mathematically you cannot rule anyone out at the moment.

On if this is the best chance to win league…

At the moment we are in the fight and that’s what you want. I believe we have the potential to do it and that’s what we want to show now in the coming games. I’ve been here for 19 years and we had some turning points in the history. When I arrived we had the financial potential to fight for the titles. After, when we moved into the new stadium, there was a period where we did not have the opportunity to fight for the title but we had to work very hard to stay at the top. In the last two, maybe two-and-a-half years, we are back in the fight because we have the financial potential again to get the best players. When you look well at the last two years, we’ve brought in Ozil, Alexis, Petr Cech. That shows that we are back and are capable to fight to get the best players.

On how much his team at Watford will be mindful of Bayern…

Not at all. For me the most important game is Watford because the Premier League is the most important competition, with the Champions League. I would say the Premier League is the most important competition for us.

On benefitting from no international-based injuries…

You can never speculate on that. You can fight for the championship if you turn up with the performances in every single game, and I believe that we’ve just come out of a very strong performance. What is at stake is for us to again show the same quality in our performance. That means show that you can focus in every single game and turn up with the same commitment in every single game. That’s what is at stake for us. Away from home, our results in the last two years have been very strong and championship [winning] stuff. But we know that the Premier League is more difficult every year as well.

On the effects of pressure…

I think our team has always performed as well as they could. We have missed some games, but every team does that. If you look at the consistency of our period where we had to fight every hard to be in the top four, we did that always. So I believe that we were always consistent. We did not always have the potential to fight for the championship maybe, but we were always consistent because we qualified 18 years for the Champions League and only one club has done better so we were always consistent.

On ticket prices…

It is my job to do that (offer value for money). Overall I feel that we have made a conscious effort in our board meetings to block the increase of our tickets and in seven of the past 10 years we have not increased our prices. Overall there is a desire ion our board to stabilise and make the tickets more affordable for people. Is football more expensive? Yes, but Saturday or Sunday if you want to go to rugby you will see the tickets are expensive there as well. It is maybe part of professionalism and a modern society.

Micky and Chas are walking down a Cornish country lane when they meet Transplant and Cockie coming the other way and they have two massive fish. Micky and Chas ask where they got the fish from and Transplant tells them, if you go the way we came then you’ll come to a bridge. One of you hold the other by the feet and dangle over him the bridge, as the fish swim by you catch them.

So Micky and Chas toodle off down the lane till they come to the bridge, Micky holds Chas by the feet (with his good arm) and dangles Chas over the bridge and says, “Chas just shout when you have a fish ok”.

The AGM is over, apparently everything in the garden is rosy, Wenger is there for as long as he wishes to stay, we only buy players who can improve the squad not just because we have the money to do so. The £3 million is for advice from experts.

Nice one `69er !………………………the only truth in that tale is the availability and consistency of Cornish trains !………………..one every 4 hours !.

Norfolk !…………………………………So Stan is an expert on Football !……………………the fcuker is not even an expert on American Football…….basketball…….baseball……..lacrosse etc` and for someone as rich as him, you would have thought he could afford a more convincing hair piece than his wife`s minge on top of his head !…….what sort of example does he set for all the balding AAers on here ?……can you imagine Rasp, Raddy, `69er, Transplant and others meeting at the Arsenal Tavern wearing the wives muffs on their heads !…….the place would stink like a fishmongers !. hahaha

Evening all, Apparently a few dodgy questions asked but our people handled them quite easily. In other words the meeting will end early should you ask the wrong questions.

Season tickets,
How can you ask for reductions, when they sell out every season. 97% of the tickets were renewed so no wonder i am still waiting.

Do supporters get value for money, Being in the top half of the table and getting into Europe for 18 years , i feel the answer has to be probably, as would you want to watch your club survive at the bottom for a reduced price.

Kroenke taking £3 million for his company, for expert advice. Good advice can be money saving and could in all honesty save that and more in a season, but when you own the football club and you can offer advice to the Board, you would assume that, that is also to his own benefit, as well as other shareholders.

Always a dodgy payment, and will bring questions from all, Handled well from Sir Chips and the questioned that likened him and Kroenke as Blatter and Platini hit home rather hard, This Payment in future will be explained in full detail in the future .

Wenger reported that he couldn’t stop Sanchez from playing for his country even though he had a hip problem, didn’t sound that bad as he scored a couple, he hinted that he may have a doubt for Watford.

Mmmm, ok Steve
Just done a U-turn 🙂
We could indeed win the league, and I now agree we’ll need luck. On the injury front
Either that, or they have spent squillions on expensive machines to prevent injuries from ever happening to Sanchez, Theo or Francis 🙂

Hey Erik
I’m going to be in Dusseldorf on Monday, and Dortmund on Tuesday
Very happy memories will return
Tragically, I land back in Bristol at 20:50 on Tuesday, precisely timed to miss the game completely 😦

I’ll take three points over Watford and a performance against Bayern. But what I really want to see in the Bayern game is us not allow them to pass all game long and go on the back foot as we sometimes do in the games against possession/pressing teams, I want to see us pass and move forward constantly.

In fact checking my diary o just want to see the game, haven’t seen any CL game in full this season as my clients are keeping me busy.

Wenger has shown a lot of irritation when asked about the selection of Ospina over Cech in CL, I am fascinated to see if he sticks to his guns on Tuesday.

As for Sanchez, he seems to be the one player who has enough clout to say when he is rested and when he isn’t — and the man clearly likes to play, that has got to be the main reason he decided to come THOF in the first place, having been messed about on and off the bench at Barcelona. So, that said even though the best thing to do would be rest him for Watford in order to give him time to recover for Bayern, my guess is he will start against Watford but come off early.

Carrying on from last night on the subject of that canyon. Well, after we spoke, I won my bid on Ebay, and as of next Thursday’s postal delivery, there is going to be a brand new big difference between us. You will be a guitarist, whereas I will be a violinist.

You may not see the threat as great, but I will be going about learning with Forest Gumplike crazy person obsession.
I will do two hours a day, every day, and in ten years I’ll be ‘effing sensational 🙂

Raddy not knowing what point and shoot your using makes it difficult to recommend, personally I’d stick to the big boys Canon or Nikon.

I’m a Canon man, they are running out of numbering options but basically:

1D and 5D pro choice
7D and 70D semi pro choice
700D amateur/hobbyist
1000D may as well stick to point and shoot.

Should also note that if you go for the 1 or 5D they generally have full frame sensors, the others have crop sensors, therefore on a 50mm lens the resultant image will look different between the full frame and crop frame bodies, there is a lot of hand wringing about which is best but basically you have to understand that a 50mm on a full frame lens performs like a traditional 38mm film camera on the crop frame body you need more like a 30mm lens to get the 38mm effect.

Lenses made for the crop frames can’t be used on full frame sensors if you think you’ll ever push up to a 1D or 5D you should consider that when buying lenses.

The best advice I can give is not to scrimp on the glass, and go for fixed focal lenses over zoom lenses for better image quality.

I still have a 500D which you can pick up quite cheaply, if I was upgrading I’d probably try and get a 700D or 70D but I’m not dissatisfied by the performance. Except in low light where digital noise becomes an issue. I’ll find a link for a good camera review website I use which gives good comparisons of noise on images.

Don’t be swayed by megapixel count either as for print purposes most DSLRs on the market will give a good quality print up to around A3, it’s only if you want to crop sections out of your image that you may consider needing a high MP count, and again the cropped image quality will still depend on your glass, the quality of the shot and the noise in the image.

I use a Canon 500D, a Tamron 18-270mm lens which is my “walk around” lens when I don’t know what I might like to photograph, a 28mm pancake lens and the famous 50mm (nifty fifty) which is great for portraiture and street photography.

Not sure if they post to Denmark but Warehouse Express or WexPhotographic have a very good refurb section on their website.

The trick Micky is the movement of your wrist. The up stroke and the down stroke. You have to manipulate your bow with the wrist. Practice long strokes which go the whole length and then some short strokes which only use an inch or two….. if you hear that you are grunting then you are doing it wrong…. a smooth stroke is essential for true satisfaction. 😀

You may be interested to know that I played violin when at school. I only joined the class because the music teacher was a gorgeous young woman named Miss Grigsby. She was fresh out of Teacher training and I got aroused when she told me how to use my wrist.

It turned out that I was a natural and reached quite a good level.
After school I’d go home to my bedroom and practice my wrist movements 🙂